My point is that it's a huge overhead for virtually no gain. This is something Linux kernel needed because of how the community around it is organized, but no commercial product works like that. Even vast majority of open-source projects don't work like that.

I mean, when you get hired into some programming shop, you don't go door-to-door and ask your new coworkers where their repository is, right? You open company's Wiki and it tells you where the repository is. You clone it and start working on your tickets, pull, push, rinse repeat. There's no reason for you to pull from your colleague's remote, even if it existed -- all communication is centralized and happens through the central hub, where various corporate policies wrt' working with repository are enforced (protected branches, CI pipelines etc.)

Over 99% of all developers in the world don't need this functionality. So, to say that you want to "Enable development that does not rely on a central repository" isn't answering the question. Yeah... it does, but why would you (or the authors of Pijul) care about this extremely rare case?